'What do women do if they don't marry,' she mused, as if she had no idea what it could be, having been married once herself and about to marry again.

I don’t like to be called “Mrs.” because I am not married, and I only belong to myself. I admire and respect people who have been successfully married for a long time, but I cannot do it. So I decided to never marry again.

In the last century, of the women whose achievements endure for us in one way or another, nearly all never married (Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett) or married late in their thirties (George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Olive Schreiner). I can think of only four (George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Gaskell) who married and had children as young women. All had servants.

And she began the oft-told tale of a lady of imperial descent who could find no husband in the narrow circle where her pride permitted her to mate, and had lived on unwed, her age now thirty, and would die unwed, for no one would have her now.

She is either male property (Mrs.), wannabe male property (Miss), or man-hating harpy (Ms.).

When I was a young man I vowed never to marry until I found the ideal woman. Well, I found her but, alas, she was waiting for the ideal man.

I feel like a woman who is not yet married.

Well, what I mean is that I shouldn’t mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can’t show off in that way by herself, I shan’t marry — at least not yet.

She only maintains that it is possible, under some circumstances, for a lady to murder her husband; but that a woman who wears ankle-strap shoes and smokes on the street corner, though she may be a joy to all who know her and have devoted her life to charity, could never qualify as a lady.

If women were particular about men’s characters, they would never get married at all.

Ah Maud, you milk-white fawn, you are all unmeet for a wife.

You say that if a woman resolves not to marry till she finds herself addressed to by a man of strict virtue, she must be for ever single. If this be true, what wicked creatures are men! What a dreadful abuse of passions, given them for the noblest purposes, are they guilty of!

I don't see why a maid should take a husband when she's bold enough to fight her own battles,

Very unfortunately, she had no husband. She had never had a husband, and therefore did not kill a husband.